John Banville - The Infinities

Consider the scene.

Their passion all used up at last, they lie in bed together naked, Dad and his girl, reclining on a strew of pillows in the morning’s plum-blue twilight. Or, rather, Dad reclines, leaning on an elbow and cradling the girl’s gold head and burnished shoulders in his lap. Her left arm is raised behind her and draped with negligent ease about his mighty neck. He gazes before him, seeing nothing. In his ancient eyes there is that look, of weariness, dashed hope, tormented melancholy, which I have seen in them so often — too often — at moments such as this. He is rehearsing in his head the age-old inquisition. When he speaks she hears not his but her husband’s voice, and feels her husband’s familiar breath waft over her breasts, a lapsing zephyr. Familiar but, it must be mundanely said, unfamiliarly sweet, for this early, sleep-encrusted hour. For, oh dear, they do tend to pong in the mornings.

“Can people who are married be in love?” he asks, in young Adam’s very voice. “I mean, can they still care as deeply, as desperately, for each other as they did when they were lovers?”

Always at the start like this his heart races, as he thinks, Perhaps, this time—?

“Mmm,” she says, and squirms, snuggling closer against him, making the tangle of dry old hair at his lap crackle under her like a nest of thorns. “You ask such things, and at such times.”

His arm is across her belly, his great, rough hand caresses her warm thigh. “You know,” he says, “it is not your husband who is here now.”

She smiles. He sees upside down her mouth, with lips pressed shut, flex like a myrmidon’s small-bow being drawn; her eyes are lightly closed under fluttering lids. “Who, then?” she asks.

He waits a weighty moment. “Why, your lover, of course.”

“Oh, yes,” she says, with a contented, feathery sigh, squirming closer still, “him, too.”

Such far silence, not a sound, in this suspended world. She opens her eyes and vainly seeks for focus in the depthless shadows above her. A blissful ease suffuses her veins. She thinks of the baby she lost last year, not with the all too familiar breath-catching stab of woe, but calmly, remotely, even; it is like looking back across a plain and seeing only a smudge of dust where a moment before had been fire and ruin and loud lamentation. The baby died inside her after some weeks of a sort of life. Not a baby at all, then, really. She pictures it as a little soft limpet clinging to the wall of the womb, blind and bewildered, washed at by amniotic tides, assailed by the muffled sounds of her innards at work, a frail failing impossible thing.

“But which would you rather,” he persists, and she feels his fingers tensing on her thigh, “the lover, or the husband?”

She might be exasperated but instead is amused. She is accustomed to her husband’s finicking way, his insistence on tracing all lines of enquiry to their logical end, as if things had an end, as if they were logical. He wants to be his father, reducing life to a set of sums. But Adam is softer than his father, and younger than the old man ever could have been, and love, not logic, is his weakness. What need has she of a baby when she has him? This is one of her secretest thoughts, one of the ones she must never utter.

“Husband or lover,” she says, “what is the difference — a ring?”

“A vow.” She puts back her head quickly to squinny up at him. His voice had sounded so strange, so deep and strange, as if it were he, now, who was making a solemn pledge. “Don’t you see,” he goes on in that same, thickened tone, in earnest haste, “—what I feel for you exceeds infinitely what a mere husband could ever be capable of feeling? Didn’t you sense that, here, with me? Have you ever been loved like this before?”

“Oh,” she says, laughing, “it was divine, surely!” She is looking up lazily again into the somehow luminous dark. She feels him nodding.

“Yes,” he says. “And you won’t forget this night, will you? When the sun rises and your husband returns you’ll remember me — won’t you?”

“But you’ll be him!”

“I shall be in him, yes, but he will not be me.”

“Well, whichever. You’re making my head swim.” With the arm that is about his neck she pulls his head forward and kisses him on the mouth the wrong side up. “Oh,” she says with a little shiver, “you feel like you have a beard.”

“Promise,” he whispers, his face suspended featureless above hers, “promise you’ll remember me.”

She grasps his head by the ears as if it were a jug and tries to waggle it. “How could I forget you, you dope?”

When she releases him he leans back on the pillows and she sees that the window behind its thin curtain is engreyed, and there is a gleam on a curtain rail, and the outline of Adam’s football poster appears on the wall, and when she looks along herself she can see her toes. It is all too quick, too much. Her eyelids droop. “Promise!” —the whisper comes again but as if from far off now. She tries to say yes, tries to give her pledge, though to what, exactly, she does not know, but sighs instead and draws up the sheet to cover herself and turns on her side and sleeps.

He too is sleeping now, my foolish father, having ranted his fill on the fickleness of girls— he , he complains of fickleness! — and their interfering husbands, the poor boobies, who do not even know themselves cuckolded. Young Adam is lucky not to have got a thunderbolt between the shoulder-blades as he blithely ploughed his wife there on that bed my Dad had so lately vacated, in the light of this day I was at last allowed to let break. And now the great god, all ardency spent, is stretched upon a cloud-bank with his thumb in his mouth, dreaming of who knows what. He is heart-sore, or would be if he had a heart. Do not mistake me, I feel a certain compassion for him. I too have found myself in his predicament, or ones very like it. I am thinking of Acacallis, Minos’s daughter, and fair Chione, mother of my boy Autolycus — oh, yes, Dad is not the only one: I have had my dalliances among the mortals, and afterwards, like him, have gnawed my knuckles in rage and pain when I had to give this or that girl back to the bonehead she was shackled to. But I do not think I suffer the same weakening effects, these droops and desponds, as Dad does from his adventures in the flesh. It seems worse for him each time, which is supposed to be impossible since nothing may change in our changeless world, either for good or ill. Perhaps he really is dying, perhaps the pursuit of love is killing him, and this is why he so fiercely persists, because he longs for it to kill him. A dying god! And the god of gods, at that! Ah, mortals, have a care and look to your souls, for if he goes, everything goes with him, bang, crash and done with at last, his Liebestod become a Götterdämmerung.

I have a confession. I indulged in a little adventure of my own this morning, after I tired of spying on my father at his pleasures with the supposedly dreaming Mrs. Adam and had fixed the clocks and set the morn to rights. Hotly restless, I ranged the house in search of diversion, and chancing on nothing to suit me there — the lady Helen was asleep and anyway offlimits, and the poor child Petra would hardly have been a fit candidate for my purposes — I swooped outside and in a twinkling found myself before Ivy Blount’s cottage. It is a grim, two-storeyed edifice with a steep-pitched slate roof and narrow, arched window-frames painted a shiny and peculiarly unpleasant, even sinister, shade of blackish green. Ivy when she saw me gave a little bat-squeak — even Ivy’s frights are tentative — and put a hand to her mouth, as maidens are meant to do, even elderly ones.